Alycia Debnam-Carey, a 22-year-old from Sydney, has major roles in two post-apocalypse shows on cable in the US (and on Foxtel's Fox8 in Australia), The 100 on youth-focused network CW and Fear the Walking Dead, AMC's spin-off from its hit series The Walking Dead.

But the latest plot twist in the former has some fans of the show up in arms: Debnam-Carey's character Lexa is a lesbian, and she has just been killed off.

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Australian actress Alycia Debnam-Carey as Lexa in The 100.Credit:CW Network

Fans from the LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex) community (and their friends and supporters) see in the death evidence of a trend on television to treat non-hetero characters as dispensable.

A hashtag protesting Lexa's demise – #CW STOP JASON ROTHENBERG – has been one of the top trending twitter topics worldwide for more than a week, having attracted more than 100,000 posts. Some protesters have celebrated the fact that Rothenberg is seemingly losing followers on Twitter even as their protest is trending upwards.

A petition on change.org calling for the character to be reinstated (which is not a narrative impossibility given the show has hedged its bets on the question of reincarnation) has attracted more than 12,000 signatories.

The demise of Lexa from The 100 has also served as the springboard for a fundraising campaign on the website of The Trevor Project, which provides suicide prevention counselling to LGBTQ teens. The organisers of that campaign, which has so far raised $38,000 towards a stated target of $40,000 have decried the "sheer callousness of those involved in selectively elevating the Queer representation of its character(s) only to backtrack in the most disingenuous of manners".

Alycia Debnam-Carey as Lexa and Eliza Taylor as her lover Clarke in The 100.Credit:Diya Perah/CW Network

Meanwhile, some outraged fans are calling for a campaign targeting sponsors and advertisers in order to "bring awareness to treatment of LGBT characters and the impact it has on LGBT viewers". The associated hashtag "LGBT fans deserve better" reportedly attracted more than 270,000 posts on Twitter.

Then 18-year-old Alycia Debnam-Carey was one of the participants in the reality series Next Stop Hollywood.Credit:Paul Kalina

The producers of The 100 are certainly not taking this lightly. Creator and showrunner Jason Rothenberg told tech site IGN that "I adore [Lexa], I think she's amazing, I miss her more than anybody else".

But, he added, the fact that she has a leading role on a rival show was a significant factor in writing her out of The 100.

"I only had the use of her as an actor for seven episodes, six really," he said. "There was a date for certain at which we were going to lose her and after that it would be very difficult to arrange to see her again and that definitely played a big role in my decision to have the story go in that direction.

"Were she not on another show, would I have not had this story play out? It's hard for me to say yes or no ... this is a world where, we've done it before, no one is safe ... there are no happy endings in the sense of easy way outs."

Over on Tumblr, the writer of the episode on which she dies, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, has been busy fielding questions from distraught fans, many of whom have expressed their sense of betrayal.

As for Alycia Debnam-Carey, she will no doubt miss playing a character she described recently as a "sword-wielding badass princess", but she can take heart from the massive support that's been shown for both her and her character.

The wide-eyed punt on fame she took as an 18-year-old participant in the 2013 reality TV series Next Stop Hollywood appears to have paid off in spades.